We provide universally-optimal distributed graph algorithms for $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximate shortest path problems including shortest-path-tree and transshipment. The universal optimality of our algorithms guarantees that, on any $n$-node network $G$, our algorithm completes in $T \cdot n^{o(1)}$ rounds whenever a $T$-round algorithm exists for $G$. This includes $D \cdot n^{o(1)}$-round algorithms for any planar or excluded-minor network. Our algorithms never require more than $(\sqrt{n} + D) \cdot n^{o(1)}$ rounds, resulting in the first sub-linear-round distributed algorithm for transshipment. The key technical contribution leading to these results is the first efficient $n^{o(1)}$-competitive linear $\ell_1$-oblivious routing operator that does not require the use of $\ell_1$-embeddings. Our construction is simple, solely based on low-diameter decompositions, and -- in contrast to all known constructions -- directly produces an oblivious flow instead of just an approximation of the optimal flow cost. This also has the benefit of simplifying the interaction with Sherman's multiplicative weight framework [SODA'17] in the distributed setting and its subsequent rounding procedures.
Harnessing distributed computing environments to build scalable inference algorithms for very large data sets is a core challenge across the broad mathematical sciences. Here we provide a theoretical framework to do so along with fully implemented examples of scalable algorithms with performance guarantees. We begin by formalizing the class of statistics which admit straightforward calculation in such environments through independent parallelization. We then show how to use such statistics to approximate arbitrary functional operators, thereby providing practitioners with a generic approximate inference procedure that does not require data to reside entirely in memory. We characterize the $L^2$ approximation properties of our approach, and then use it to treat two canonical examples that arise in large-scale statistical analyses: sample quantile calculation and local polynomial regression. A variety of avenues and extensions remain open for future work.
Cell-free Massive MIMO systems consist of a large number of geographically distributed access points (APs) that serve users by coherent joint transmission. Downlink power allocation is important in these systems, to determine which APs should transmit to which users and with what power. If the system is implemented correctly, it can deliver a more uniform user performance than conventional cellular networks. To this end, previous works have shown how to perform system-wide max-min fairness power allocation when using maximum ratio precoding. In this paper, we first generalize this method to arbitrary precoding, and then train a neural network to perform approximately the same power allocation but with reduced computational complexity. Finally, we train one neural network per AP to mimic system-wide max-min fairness power allocation, but using only local information. By learning the structure of the local propagation environment, this method outperforms the state-of-the-art distributed power allocation method from the Cell-free Massive MIMO literature.
We prove complex contraction for zero-free regions of counting weighted set cover problem in which an element can appear in an unbounded number of sets, thus obtaining fully polynomial-time approximation schemes(FPTAS) via Barvinok's algorithmic paradigm\cite{barvinok2016combinatorics}. Relying on the computation tree expansion, our approach does not need proof of correlation decay in the real axis. We directly look in the complex plane for a region that contracts into its interior as the tree recursion procedure goes from leaves to the root. For the class of problems under the framework of weighted set covers, we are able to give a general approach for describing the contraction regions and draw a unified algorithmic conclusion. Several previous results, including counting (weighted-)edge covers, counting bipartite independent sets and counting monotone CNFs can be completely or partially covered by our main theorem. In contrast to the correlation decay method which also depends on tree expansions and needs different potential functions for different problems, our approach is more generic in the sense that our contraction region for different problems shares a common shape in the complex plane.
In this paper, we consider the distributed optimization problem where $n$ agents, each possessing a local cost function, collaboratively minimize the average of the local cost functions over a connected network. To solve the problem, we propose a distributed random reshuffling (D-RR) algorithm that combines the classical distributed gradient descent (DGD) method and Random Reshuffling (RR). We show that D-RR inherits the superiority of RR for both smooth strongly convex and smooth nonconvex objective functions. In particular, for smooth strongly convex objective functions, D-RR achieves $\mathcal{O}(1/T^2)$ rate of convergence (here, $T$ counts the total number of iterations) in terms of the squared distance between the iterate and the unique minimizer. When the objective function is assumed to be smooth nonconvex and has Lipschitz continuous component functions, we show that D-RR drives the squared norm of gradient to $0$ at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/T^{2/3})$. These convergence results match those of centralized RR (up to constant factors).
Unified understanding of neuro networks (NNs) gets the users into great trouble because they have been puzzled by what kind of rules should be obeyed to optimize the internal structure of NNs. Considering the potential capability of random graphs to alter how computation is performed, we demonstrate that they can serve as architecture generators to optimize the internal structure of NNs. To transform the random graph theory into an NN model with practical meaning and based on clarifying the input-output relationship of each neuron, we complete data feature mapping by calculating Fourier Random Features (FRFs). Under the usage of this low-operation cost approach, neurons are assigned to several groups of which connection relationships can be regarded as uniform representations of random graphs they belong to, and random arrangement fuses those neurons to establish the pattern matrix, markedly reducing manual participation and computational cost without the fixed and deep architecture. Leveraging this single neuromorphic learning model termed random graph-based neuro network (RGNN) we develop a joint classification mechanism involving information interaction between multiple RGNNs and realize significant performance improvements in supervised learning for three benchmark tasks, whereby they effectively avoid the adverse impact of the interpretability of NNs on the structure design and engineering practice.
The stochastic dynamic matching problem has recently drawn attention in the stochastic-modeling community due to its numerous applications, ranging from supply-chain management to kidney exchange programs. In this paper, we consider a matching problem in which items of different classes arrive according to independent Poisson processes. Unmatched items are stored in a queue, and compatibility constraints are described by a simple graph on the classes, so that two items can be matched if their classes are neighbors in the graph. We analyze the efficiency of matching policies, not only in terms of system stability, but also in terms of matching rates between different classes. Our results rely on the observation that, under any stable policy, the matching rates satisfy a conservation equation that equates the arrival and departure rates of each item class. Our main contributions are threefold. We first introduce a mapping between the dimension of the solution set of this conservation equation, the structure of the compatibility graph, and the existence of a stable policy. In particular, this allows us to derive a necessary and sufficient stability condition that is verifiable in polynomial time. Secondly, we describe the convex polytope of non-negative solutions of the conservation equation. When this polytope is reduced to a single point, we give a closed-form expression of the solution; in general, we characterize the vertices of this polytope using again the graph structure. Lastly, we show that greedy policies cannot, in general, achieve every point in the polytope. In contrast, non-greedy policies can reach any point of the interior of this polytope, and we give a condition for these policies to also reach the boundary of the polytope.
Motivated by many interesting real-world applications in logistics and online advertising, we consider an online allocation problem subject to lower and upper resource constraints, where the requests arrive sequentially, sampled i.i.d. from an unknown distribution, and we need to promptly make a decision given limited resources and lower bounds requirements. First, with knowledge of the measure of feasibility, i.e., $\alpha$, we propose a new algorithm that obtains $1-O(\frac{\epsilon}{\alpha-\epsilon})$ -competitive ratio for the offline problems that know the entire requests ahead of time. Inspired by the previous studies, this algorithm adopts an innovative technique to dynamically update a threshold price vector for making decisions. Moreover, an optimization method to estimate the optimal measure of feasibility is proposed with theoretical guarantee at the end of this paper. Based on this method, if we tolerate slight violation of the lower bounds constraints with parameter $\eta$, the proposed algorithm is naturally extended to the settings without strong feasible assumption, which cover the significantly unexplored infeasible scenarios.
We study the problem of learning in the stochastic shortest path (SSP) setting, where an agent seeks to minimize the expected cost accumulated before reaching a goal state. We design a novel model-based algorithm EB-SSP that carefully skews the empirical transitions and perturbs the empirical costs with an exploration bonus to guarantee both optimism and convergence of the associated value iteration scheme. We prove that EB-SSP achieves the minimax regret rate $\widetilde{O}(B_{\star} \sqrt{S A K})$, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions and $B_{\star}$ bounds the expected cumulative cost of the optimal policy from any state, thus closing the gap with the lower bound. Interestingly, EB-SSP obtains this result while being parameter-free, i.e., it does not require any prior knowledge of $B_{\star}$, nor of $T_{\star}$ which bounds the expected time-to-goal of the optimal policy from any state. Furthermore, we illustrate various cases (e.g., positive costs, or general costs when an order-accurate estimate of $T_{\star}$ is available) where the regret only contains a logarithmic dependence on $T_{\star}$, thus yielding the first horizon-free regret bound beyond the finite-horizon MDP setting.
We present the problem of selecting relevant premises for a proof of a given statement. When stated as a binary classification task for pairs (conjecture, axiom), it can be efficiently solved using artificial neural networks. The key difference between our advance to solve this problem and previous approaches is the use of just functional signatures of premises. To further improve the performance of the model, we use dimensionality reduction technique, to replace long and sparse signature vectors with their compact and dense embedded versions. These are obtained by firstly defining the concept of a context for each functor symbol, and then training a simple neural network to predict the distribution of other functor symbols in the context of this functor. After training the network, the output of its hidden layer is used to construct a lower dimensional embedding of a functional signature (for each premise) with a distributed representation of features. This allows us to use 512-dimensional embeddings for conjecture-axiom pairs, containing enough information about the original statements to reach the accuracy of 76.45% in premise selection task, only with simple two-layer densely connected neural networks.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.